Tools

Continuous Measurement and Benchmarking for Agile

A new Application Intelligence Platform 7.1 (AIP) from Cast designed to analyze security, robustness, health, and reliability of software systems has been updated with a new Delivery Management Tool. This augmentation should allow users to upload their source directly within the Cast AIP portal with the press of a button.

This software is intended to help team leaders to benchmark the quality of their applications against competitors in their industry, as well as ease the burden of analyzing and measuring the software structure of enterprise-sized applications.

NOTE: AIP 7.1 comes to market with several enhancements for software analysis, including enhanced configuration management, a new custom reporting engine, an extended API, and advanced source code delivery automation.

Cast is all about making big claims and the firm says that these new capabilities make AIP the "closest the market has seen" to a fully automated, plug-and-play solution for the enterprise.

"I'm sure the CEOs of NASDAQ, Knight Capital, American Airlines, and Sabre wished they had CAST AIP 7.1 pointed at their critical IT systems before they crashed and made headlines, tarnished their image, and sent their stocks plummeting," said Dr. Bill Curtis, chief scientist at Cast.

NOTE: Curtis means crashed the company stocks, not the airline.

"Every one of these companies could have benefited from having the latest AIP dashboard on the CEO's desk. I'm confident none of these failures would have happened if they had been able to see this train coming before it went off the rails," he added.

The new reporting capability uses the extended, REST-ful web service API, linking preconfigured templates in MS Word to the AIP knowledgebase. To customize additional reports, the customer has to configure a new MS Word template, connect the fields to those available via the API, and hit go.

A new level of source code delivery automation is introduced in the Delivery Management Tool (DMT). The DMT plugs into all forms of source code management and build management tooling. Integrations to major tools are available on the CAST Customer Forum; exotic or custom tools are integrated by scripting.

The DMT then orchestrates the collection of all source code elements needed to fully represent a snapshot of an application. DMT automatically checks the completeness of the application, ensuring apples-to-apples analysis between snapshots — an issue that's critical when implementing enterprise-grade software measurement.

In its latest incarnation, AIP provides advanced application analytics for decision support, software risk prevention, and application visibility unavailable to this point at the enterprise level. AIP v7.1 has been in beta deployment over the summer and is generally available as of September 24.

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